Anyone else looking forward to the Godzilla vs Kong movie ?

[rob-c]

I’ve always been a huge fan of both I remember as a kid watching them on tv every chance I got . Back then compared to now the CGI is just awesome vs the guys in the monster suits . 

Edited February 26, 2021 by rob-c

[Daveboone]

Okay, I will admit my wife and I love them. We are both huge fans of the old monster flicks (although I can do without the cartoonish child oriented Godzilla flicks (Godzilla vs the Smog Monster!). They fall under the category of Popcorn Movies...saturday afternoon fun flicks. No thinking required. 

I do remember thinking as a kid though, how wimpy are the Japanese when their idea of a monster is a huge butterfly (Mothra)?

[left field]

I waver on newer CGI, generally not liking it, though I'll admit that Jackson's King Kong was great. I teared up a little when that big dope bought it at the end.

Studying and working in animation for years made me fan of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. This sequence from Jason and the Argonauts is one of the greatest animated scenes ever filmed.

 

[loworange88]

I used to watch the older movies as a kid.  I remember TBS or one of the cable stations used to have monster movie marathons which would include Godzilla movies, and also stuff like Morgus the Magnificent.  My boys like the newer movies, and they watched some of the older ones too.  We are pumped to watch the new movie next month on HBO.

[left field]

What really sells that scene is the timing and pacing of the dramatic anticipation. It takes a full minute before the skeleton advance. Harryhausen said that the rising from the earth scene was incredibly labourious and he could have just had the skeletons appear in smoke, but that would have been wrong. Great filmmaking.

Here's a still from the making of:

And Harryhausen talking about the scene:

Quote

The climax of the film is the battle with the children of the Hydra's teeth. When Acetes catches up with Jason he scatters the teeth while calling on the forces of darkness to avenge him of the crime. From out of the ground appear armed skeletons. In the legend it is rotting corpses, but we thought this would give the film a certificate that might have barred children, so we decided on seven skeletons.

Each of the model skeletons was about eight to 10 inches high, and six of the seven were made for the sequence. The remaining one was a veteran from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, slightly repainted to match the new members of the family. When all the skeletons have manifested themselves to Jason and his men, they are commanded by Acetes to "Kill, kill, kill them all", and we hear an unearthly scream. What follows is a sequence of which I am very proud. I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronised to the actors' movements. Some days I was producing less than one second of screen time; in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months.

How do you kill skeletons? We puzzled over this for some time and, in the end, opted for simplicity by having Jason jump off the cliff into the sea, followed by the skeletons. It was the only way to kill off something that was already dead, and besides, we assumed that they couldn't swim. After filming a stuntman jump into the sea, the prop men threw seven plaster skeletons off the cliff, which had to be done correctly on the first take as we couldn't retrieve them. To this day there are, somewhere in the sea near that hotel on the cliff edge, the plaster bones of seven skeletons.

Jason and the Argonauts took nearly two years to complete and cost an unprecedented (for us) $3m. Although we had made the film under the title of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Columbia discovered that there had been an Italian sword and sandal movie starring Steve Reeves with the same title. So the publicity department came up with a fist of alternatives. Eventually we decided on Jason and the Argonauts.

When the film was released, it generally received good reviews, although Time magazine said that "they have dreamed up monsters Jason never saw, including a steam-powered King Kong, built of bronze, with a drain plug in his heel". Well yes, we do take "liberties" - because the film has to appeal to general audiences, and you can't do that if you stick to every detail. It was also unfortunate that the film opened in the US at the same time as the public was becoming tired of the Italian muscle epics that we had desperately tried to avoid being associated with.

As almost a footnote, Columbia submitted the picture to the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration as a special effects contender. We expected it to earn at least a nomination for visual effects, but it was ignored. The picture that won was Cleopatra. I am told by certain Academy members that my film was seen then as nothing very extraordinary, but how could that be, when at the time nothing like it had ever been done for the screen?

 

[Jeremy K]

Would you guys believe I still have the scratch and sniff 3d glass they handed out like 35 years ago when they televised a 3d king Kong movie 

[Daveboone]

4 hours ago, Jeremy K said:

Would you guys believe I still have the scratch and sniff 3d glass they handed out like 35 years ago when they televised a 3d king Kong movie 

Mein gott! what the devil were you sniffing? Monkey poo? Sweat? Bananas?

[Jeremy K]

34 minutes ago, Daveboone said:

Mein gott! what the devil were you sniffing? Monkey poo? Sweat? Bananas?

Theres a small bunch of bananas between the eyes ,it smells like bananas LOL